Greek President Konstantinos Tasoulas said Greece's claims for wartime reparations from Germany remain legally valid and can still be pursued, as he joined commemorations in Crete on 13 September 2026 marking 83 years since Nazi occupation forces massacred hundreds of civilians in the Viannos region.
Tasoulas met survivors of the massacre during events organized by the Municipality of Heraklion to honor victims of what is remembered locally as the Holocaust and Destruction of the villages of Viannos and Ierapetra, in southeastern Crete.
He said the Hellenic Republic's claims for reparations over the German destruction, the German atrocities and the German forced loan remained impossible to extinguish. He added that the claims were not only emotionally and historically justified but legally active and could still be pursued.
Tasoulas also urged that the crimes must not be forgotten, so that they are not repeated and so that similar inhuman ideologies, whether open or disguised, do not get the chance to reappear.
The Viannos massacre
In a statement issued after a doxology service at the Church of All Saints, led by Metropolitan Damaskinos of Didymoteicho and Orestiada and Metropolitan Andreas of Arkalochori, Kasteli and Viannos, Tasoulas said the ceremony honored the memory of what he described as the horrific and unjust Holocaust inflicted on the then-province of Viannos, in the Heraklion region, and on western Ierapetra, by Nazi occupation troops in mid-September 1943.
According to Tasoulas, 461 civilians were killed, 1,000 houses were destroyed and more than 20 villages were wiped off the map during the reprisals.
'A debt to memory'
Tasoulas said that, so many years later, Greece still carried a heavy and permanent debt toward that atrocity: a debt to defend the freedom and independence for which those victims ultimately lost their lives, and a debt to preserve their memory.
He said Greece also owed a debt of vindication to those who died, which was why, on behalf of the Greek state, he stressed that the country's claims for reparations remained active and legally enforceable, not merely symbolic.
The Viannos massacre is remembered as one of the deadliest reprisal operations carried out by German occupation forces in Greece during the Second World War. The question of German reparations for wartime destruction in Greece has remained a longstanding and unresolved issue between Athens and Berlin.
